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Sep

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>In honor of Banned books week, I’m giving away two books. We all love book give-aways, right? I was originally planning on only giving away 1 book, but with that lovely fiasco last week, I decided to go ahead and add another.

So there will be two winners in this contest. First place winner will receive their choice of Crank by Ellen Hopkins or Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

Speak

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won’t talk to her, and people she doesn’t even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that’s not safe. Because there’s something she’s trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth. This extraordinary first novel has captured the imaginations of teenagers and adults across the country.

Crank

Kristina Georgia Snow is the perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. But on a trip to visit her absentee father, Kristina disappears and Bree takes her place. Bree is the exact opposite of Kristina — she’s fearless. Through a boy, Bree meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild, ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul — her life.

The reason I added Speak in, is because I think it’s absolutely disgusting that because one man found rape scenes in a YA book sexually arousing, that he has the right to ban other people from reading it. This bothers me for several reasons: 1) From the article it appears he never read the book and 2) if he did read the book, why on earth did he consider the rape scenes pornography, which in its definition states that pornography is “printed or visual content with the explicit intent to arouse or stimulate erotic feelings.”

That in and of itself is…well, it’s creepy to say the least. So, I’ve added Speak to the giveaway. All you have to do is fill in my teeny, tiny entry form below, oh and maybe become a follower, or tweet and blog about it. No biggie, right. 😀

The contest starts today and ends October 5, 2010 at midnight. Winners will be drawn randomly and results will be posted October 5th.

Speak up:

Sep

Filed in:

Speak up:

Sep

Filed in:

I’ve been working with my son on verb tenses and I realized how confusing it could get, so I decided to do a post on verb tense.

Verb Tense

Verb tenses give a hint to the reader when your story took place (i.e.past, present, future.Futurue will probably only take place in dialogue.I can’t imagine writing an entire story in future tense.:D)

Most stories are written in past tense, but some recent stories have been written in present tense (my latest for example.Hunger Games trilogy for a better example.)It’s important to learn tenses because you must stick to the same tense for the entire story.The only exceptions are: internal thoughts and dialogue are written in present tense, even if you’re in past. And flashbacks are allowed to be in past tense during a present tense story (though it can pull your reader out if you don’t have a good transition.)